Title Plasma
Status Active
Start Date 12-16-2004
Contributors Bill Orr, Shan Zhou
Version 0.5

Plasma

The initial release of Plasma is now available. Click on 'Download Files' for the Windows Setup executable.

Download the source code here. We built the program with Dev-Cpp 4.9.9.2. Please let us know of any bugs you find through the 'Contact Me' page in the 'About' section. Thanks, we appreciate it.

Plasma is an open source project for making visualizations of mathematical objects. The goal is to create a program for plotting functions and drawing other mathematical objects that is easy to use and allows you to manipulate the view in any way you want. There are many very powerful mathematics programs that give you static plots that you can't even rotate. And most of these programs make it difficult to add a time-dependence to your plots. With plasma, if you add a 't' to your plot expression, it will animate the plot by incrementing the value of t. So Sin[x-t] will display a travelling wave. Nothing in Plasma is new or revolutionary, it is just the first time that anyone has done a plotting program right.

  • 2D and 3D Time-Dependent/Scrollable/Zoomable/Rotatable Function, Parametric, and Vector Plots
  • Support for multiple simultaneous plots
  • Smart axes labelling
  • Several coloring modes for surfaces
  • Discontinuity checking for 2D plots
  • Hotkeys to tweak almost any aspect of the object
  • Save image to a PNG with a single keypress
  • Special Objects like Spheres and Torus Knots